The Daily - A Historic Night in Georgia

Episode Date: January 6, 2021

The long fight for control of the U.S. Senate is drawing to a close in Georgia, and the Democrats appear set to win out — the Rev. Raphael Warnock is the projected winner of his race against Senator Kelly Loeffler, while Jon Ossoff is heavily favored to beat the other incumbent Republican, Senator David Perdue. Today, we look at the results so far from these history-making Senate races and at what they mean for the future and fortunes of the two main parties.Guest: Nate Cohn, a domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times. For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here.Background reading: A Baptist preacher born and raised in Georgia, Raphael Warnock has defeated Kelly Loeffler to become his state’s first Black senator, breaking a barrier with distinct meaning in American politics.A surge in turnout from Georgia’s Black voters has powered the fortunes of Mr. Warnock and Jon Ossoff.You can follow the results here. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in the closely watched Georgia runoffs, the Democrats win one race and are heavily favored in the second, putting Democratic control of the Senate within reach. My colleague, Nate Cohn, on a historic night in Georgia. It's Wednesday, January 6th. Well, Nate, good morning.

Good morning. I have to say, this was not a telephone call or a election call that we were expecting to have tonight. You know, I'm surprised to hear that. Does that mean there was worse planning on your end than I typically expect from you guys? I mean, we had it on really good journalistic authority that the Georgia Senate runoffs were going to take days to count. And here we are, I guess, seven hours after the polls close, and we have real news from this race. It's true. We have a projection.

So Nate, tell us exactly where things stand at 2.30 a.m. on Wednesday morning in these runoffs. Well, there are two contests, and one of them we have a projectedm. on Wednesday morning in these runoffs? Well, there are two contests, and one of them, we have a projected winner. The Democrat Raphael Warnock has defeated Kelly Loeffler in the Senate special election. And in the regular Senate election between John Ossoff and David Perdue, the Democrat John Ossoff has a slight lead of a few thousand votes with nearly all of the vote in and counted. So help us understand how we can have one Senate race called the other not called. Because I'm having a little bit of trouble imagining in a race where two Democrats are on the ballot and two Republicans are on the ballot, understanding how one Democratic Senate candidate gets ahead of the other. I had long imagined that any Democratic voter who cast a ballot

was going to cast a ballot for both. That's certainly a reasonable expectation. I think that there are a lot of people who vote based on personality, based on how much they like somebody. And as far back as the November election, it was clear that the Democrats were better positioned in the special election than they were in the regularly scheduled election. I think there are a couple of explanations. One is that the Republicans had a pretty brutal primary in the run-up to the November special election, and Kelly Loeffler ran pretty far to the right in that primary.

You may recall that she ran a television advertisement claiming that she was further to the right than Attila Bahun. In contrast, there was not a fierce inter-party battle on the right for the regularly scheduled election. David Perdue was a well-established incumbent and who, despite being very conservative, still has a little bit of appeal to a traditionally Republican voter

that maybe has swung over to the Democrats in recent cycles. And we're talking about a very small number of voters, to be clear, at the moment. There's only about a percentage point that separates the two candidates. So it doesn't take much to create this sort of seemingly significant difference. Well, what is the fact that the race has been called for Raphael Warnock, but not for John Ossoff?

Tell us about exactly who showed up for this election. I don't think it tells us anything. I think that basically under any plausible turnout scenario, we expected Warnock to be in the stronger position in this race. That wasn't inevitable, of course, but that was the expectation. We do know from the results that we see at the precinct level and by county that Democrats enjoyed a really strong turnout in this election. A higher proportion of voters appeared to return to the polls for this runoff election in Democratic-leaning precincts and counties,

and in particular in majority black precincts and counties than did in counties that voted for the president or were majority whites without a degree. That feels significant. We do not understand special elections, runoff elections, to ever draw the same kind of turnout that presidential elections draw. So this feels very unique. Yeah, this is a huge turnout. I mean, there were a lot of truly terrible turnout predictions over the last two months. And at the moment, I think the turnout is close to 90% of the general election. More people voted in this election than voted in Georgia in the 2016 presidential election. Now, granted, there's been population growth in Georgia since then, and Georgia has become a more competitive state at the presidential level since then, and this was a race for control of the Senate. But I think that

indicates that this was, I mean, this was basically a presidential electorate that we had when typically a runoff election might be expected to look like, you know, at best a midterm, but often even a lower turnout election than that, something more like a primary election than a midterm election. Now, you started to mention the turnout of Black voters in Georgia, and I wonder how significant that was and how central you think that is to Warnock's projected victory and Ossoff's lead so far. It's a huge part of it.

Georgia has the second or third largest Black population in the country. In the general election, it was probably something just short of 30% of the vote. And so that's a majority of the Democratic voters in this state. All indications that we have right now suggest that the Black share of the electorate was higher in these runoff elections than it was in the general election in November. You know, it's still too early to pin that down with precision. We'll get authoritative data on that in the weeks ahead. But all the data that we have at this point suggests that the increase in black turnout, or maybe put more precisely, the decrease in black turnout compared to the general

election was smaller than the decrease in white turnout or Latino turnout or particularly white working class turnout. So all the mobilization that we have been hearing about and talking about on the daily of the black Georgia electorate for this runoff, and really, I guess, starting with the presidential election, for this runoff. And really, I guess, starting with the presidential election, that has truly potentially made the difference here in at least one and possibly both of these Senate runoffs. Yeah, I think that extra mobilization, that relative increase in the black share of the electorate could easily prove to be the decisive factor in Democrats taking back the Senate when we have all the data in to say for sure. So based on the current vote counting, should we assume that John Ossoff stands a reasonably good chance of pulling out a victory of his own like Warnock?

I mean, just how connected are these two races? Connected are these two races. Is it possible to imagine that the Democrats win one seat, the Warnock seat, and the Republicans win the other seat, the Perdue seat? I don't think that's realistic at this point. There's not going to be a call for a little bit. If you remember from the general election, the news organizations are reluctant to call these races until a candidate leads by more than the margin of a recount. But John Ossoff has essentially won this race. I mean, at the moment, he's up by three-tenths of a point, 13,000 votes or so. That's a larger lead than Joe Biden's lead was in the final account in Georgia in terms of both percentage points and vote margins. And I mean, all of the remaining

vote left is Democratic vote. There's 50,000 absentee ballots that are going to break for Ossoff by a two-to-one margin or more.,000 absentee ballots that are going to break for Ossoff by a two to one margin or more. There are provisional ballots that are going to break for Ossoff. It's just there's not a path for David Perdue, even if the networks may not call the race in the immediate future. It's not there for the Republicans. Nate, I think a lot of people listening to you talk the way that you are is going to be among the first times it's dawned on them that Democrats are very much on the cusp of retaking control of the Senate. And that has a lot of implications. Yeah, I mean, you're right. We can't make the call. But the

Democrats, for all intents and purposes at this point, will control the Senate. And the consequences of that for the Biden presidency are enormous. It will allow them to confirm nominees with considerably greater ease. It'll let them pass budget reconciliation packages that let them do all sorts of things with a mere majority of the vote. It'll give them control of the committees. I mean, it will completely transform the first two years of Biden's presidency. We'll be right back. So Nate, turning to the Republican side and to Loeffler and Perdue, there were a lot of questions ahead of these runoffs about the president's message that the November election had been stolen, his really forceful criticism of election officials in Georgia, whether that

was going to depress the Republican vote. Does that seem to have happened? Yeah, I think that's tough to say. I mean, the Republican turnout was really healthy by any measure other than the final result. I mean, the turnout in overwhelmingly Trump precincts was at 88% of the general election. You know, you don't have this sort of stupendous turnout only from one side. Clearly, the Democratic turnout was superior to the Republican turnout in this election. I think that's pretty obvious when you look at the precinct results, at least if you're comparing to the general election and taking that as your baseline. motivated Democratic Biden voters by thumbing his nose in the face of their victory and basically not hearing the message they were trying to send. Or you want to say that he deflated Republican voters by saying their votes wouldn't count. And that's very hard for me to untangle. And maybe

it's some combination of both of them. I think a lot of people are wondering if what happened tonight in Georgia starts to tell us something about President Trump and about Trumpism and whether or not the party can win elections when Donald Trump is not on the ballot. And so what are we learning from the results so far? I mean, to me, this election was very much dominated by the president. Back in November, these two candidates ran ahead of President Trump in Georgia. Over the last two months, I would argue that they're more tied to the president than ever before, and arguably in a way that makes it harder and harder for them to win over the sliver of Biden-Purdue voters that they won in November. You know, someone who's a moderate Republican in Georgia who might favor Senator Perdue, who was up for election tonight, and Joe Biden, but might have reservations about Donald Trump.

Yeah, a rich Republican. And there were a lot of these voters on the north side of Atlanta in the most affluent areas of North Fulton and DeKalb counties. And so, you know, the president has continuously makes it harder for Republicans to distinguish themselves from him. At the same time, the president does a lot to mobilize and motivate Democrats to come out against him. And I think that the last two months have done plenty to convince people that they ought to come out and vote if they're a Democrat in Georgia after, you know, the way the president's acted over the last few months. Do you suspect that the results here, and given what you just said, means that the Republican Party is going to want to start untethering itself from Trumpism and from Trump? Because regardless of the strength of his base,

this legendary group of voters that will come out when he asks them to, what happened in Georgia suggests that he is starting to be seen as much as a problem for Republicans as a solution going forward. Yeah, the president has put the Republican Party in a tough spot. I mean, the fundamental dynamic that the Republicans face right now, which the president is just a little bit less popular than they'd like him to be nationwide

and in the critical battleground states and in Georgia, a traditionally Republican state. And as a result, for them to win, they need to win over a few voters, not that many, but a few voters who don't like the president and who maybe used to vote Republican before the president came to dominate American politics. But he just makes it too hard for them to be able to do that because he's such a dominant force in American life. of Republican politics, but he's not popular enough to win the crucial moderate votes required to win something like the presidency in Georgia or a Senate race. And so the party is stuck so long as he remains the most powerful emblem of the Republican brand. Yep, that's right. Sunit, as you know, in a few hours, Congress is going to convene, and its job will be to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the Electoral College. Many Republicans intend to object. It is expected to be chaotic and polarized and ugly. And I wonder what Warnock's projected win and Ossoff's lead

mean for that process, potentially. I think it has the potential to change the dynamic a bit. And if you step back for a moment, I mean, the Republicans came out of the November election feeling pretty good in the scheme of having lost a presidential election. They won a lot of the Senate races they wanted to win. The president did better than they expected. And, you know, they didn't have too many reason to think after that, that they needed to go and distance themselves from him. And as a result, many Republicans have been inclined to follow him down an increasingly perilous path toward contesting this presidential election. And now Republicans are going to look at a very different set of results. They're going to look at two Republicans who have lost, and they will have also, as a

result of losing, cost the party control of the Senate. Potentially, yes. In all likelihood, will cost the party control of the Senate. And I would think that being on the verge of losing control of the Senate would make them at least reconsider the idea that there are no political costs to following the president down this pretty reckless path of challenging legitimate Democratic election results in a half dozen states. Including, I believe, Georgia? Including Georgia. Well, Nate, thank you, get some rest we appreciate your time. No problem, thanks for having me We were told

that we couldn't win this election but tonight we prove that with hope, hard work, and the people by our side, anything is possible. On Wednesday morning, Raphael Warnock spoke to his supporters, recalling his journey from a public housing project in Savannah to becoming the first black senator from Georgia. And my mother, who as a teenager growing up in Waycross, Georgia, used to pick somebody else's cotton. somebody else's cotton. But the other day, because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else's cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States Senator. So I come before you tonight as a man who knows that the improbable journey that led me to this place in this historic moment in America could only happen here.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Today we're going to talk in great detail about the events that happened here in Kenosha on August 23rd, 2020. The district attorney in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has declined to bring charges against the white police officer who repeatedly shot a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back, outside of his apartment in August. A shooting that sparked protests and rioting. And in this situation, an exhaustive investigation was done. There's more than 40 hours of squad video.

There's hundreds of pages of electronic information. The district attorney, Michael Gravely, said that there was insufficient evidence to bring a charge against the officer, who shot Blake after he had resisted arrest, avoided a taser, and opened the door to a car where police found a knife. The shooting severed Blake's spinal cord, leaving him partially paralyzed and unlikely to ever walk. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vander Ploeg and Daniel Guimet. It was edited by Lisa Chow and M.J. Davis-Lynn and engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.